G20 commits to trade liberalization and fighting protectionism

By PDS | 17 October 2005

The G20 group of nations which includes Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey, as well as the advanced G7 nations, has agreed that a...

...successful WTO Doha Development Round is critical for ensuring globalization truly benefits all countries, and would make a key contribution to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). We urge all parties concerned to provide the necessary political impetus to promote trade liberalization, fight protectionism, and make real progress at the WTO Ministerial Conference to be held in Hong Kong, China, later this year, with the view to concluding the negotiations by the end of 2006. We are committed to significantly increasing market access for goods and services, reducing trade-distorting domestic support, eliminating all forms of export subsidies in agriculture, providing effective special and differential treatment for developing countries, and increasing aid for trade to enhance the capacity of developing countries to take advantage of expanded trade opportunities.

Despite it being the clearly stated wish of the most populous nations in the developing world to fight protectionism, left-wing Western NGOs still oppose free trade. Unelected, politically-motivated, anti-capitalist, anti-globalization activists claim to speak on behalf of the developing world's poor: in reality they speak a language of neo-colonialism, telling the elected representatives of a great democracy like India that they are wrong to seek to engage increasingly in world trade. In reality anti-globalization NGOs are a vocal but politically-marginalised minority who cloak themselves in pro-poor language whilst advocating protectionist policies which favour the few producers over the many consumers. The developing world's governments are right to ignore their siren calls.